“The real similarity between the Stolypin and the Narodnik agrarian
programmes lies in the fact that both advocate a radical break-up of the
old, medieval system of landownership. And that is very good. That system
deserves no better than to be broken up. The most reactionary of all are
those Cadets of Rech and Russkiye Vedomosti who reproach
Stolypin for causing a break-up, instead of proving the need for a still
more consistent and resolute break-up. We shall see in a following article
that the Stolypin type of break-up cannot do away with bondage and
labour service, while the Narodnik type can.

“For the time being we shall note that the only entirely real result of the
Stolypin break-up is a famine among 30 million people. And it remains to be seen
whether the Stolypin break-up may not teach the Russian people how
they should carry out a more thorough break-up. It is no doubt teaching
that. But will it succeed in it? Time will
tell.”[1]

And so, the question now confronting us is: why is it that the Stolypin
break-up of medieval landownership cannot, while the
peasant-Trudovik or Narodnik break-up can, do away with bondage
and labour service?

In starting to analyse this question, we shall note first of all that
one of the fundamental defects of the most wide spread arguments concerning
this matter—arguments that are liberal, Narodnik and partly revisionist
(P. Maslov)—is
the abstract presentation of the question, ignoring the concrete
historical “replacement’s which is actually coming about. The replacement
coming about in Russia has long since occurred in the advanced countries of
the West: it is the replacement of a feudal by a capitalist economy.

It is, and can only be, a question of the forms, conditions, rapidity
and circumstances of this replacement; all other considerations,
which are not infrequently put in the forefront, are no more than an
unwitting beating about the bush, the “bush” being precisely
this replacement.

The predominant feudal form of modern Russian agriculture is bondage
and labour service. The preservation of natural economy to a comparatively
considerable degree, the existence of the small cultivator who cannot make
both ends meet and farms on a tiny patch of poor land, using old,
wretchedly inadequate implements and production methods, and the economic
dependence of this small cultivator on the owner of the neighbouring
latifundium, who exploits him not only as a wage-labourer (which marks the
beginning of capitalism), but as a small cultivator (which is a
continuation of the corvée system)—these are the conditions
engendering bondage and labour service, or rather, characterising both the
one and the other.

For the 30,000 big landlords in European Russia there are 10,000,000
households of the peasant poor. The average result is roughly the
following: one landlord owning over 2,000 dessiatines is surrounded by some
300 peasant house holds, each owning approximately 7 dessiatines of poor
and exhausted land and equipped with implements that are incredibly
outdated and primitive (from the European point of view, to say nothing of
the American).

Some of the well-to-do peasants “get on in the world”, i.e., become
petty bourgeois using wage-labour to cultivate their land. The landlords,
many of whom yesterday were serf-owning lords or are their sons, resort to
the same kind of labour on a certain part of their land and for certain
farming operations.

But besides these capitalist relations, and pushing them into the
background in all the purely Russian gubernias of European Russia, there is
the cultivation of landlord land by peasants using their own implements and
livestock, that
is to say, labour service, a continuation of the former corvée, and
there is also the “utilisation” of the desperate want of the small
cultivator (precisely as a cultivator, as a small proprietor) for
“service” on the neighbouring landed estate, that is to say,
bondage. Money loans in exchange for work, grain loans, winter
hire, land lease, permission to use the road, watering-place, meadows,
pastures and woods, the lending of implements and livestock, and so on and
so forth, are all infinitely varied forms of modern bondage.

Things are sometimes pushed to the length of obliging the peasant to
fertilise the landlord’s fields with manure from his own farm, while the
“housewife” is obliged to provide eggs—and this not in the eighteenth,
but in the twentieth century A.D.!

One has only to pose clearly and precisely the problem of these
survivals of medievalism and feudalism in modern Russian agriculture to
appreciate the significance of the Stolypin “reform”. This “reform”, of
course, gave dying serfdom a new lease of life, just as the notorious,
so-called “peasant” (in reality landlord), Reform of 1861,
extolled by the liberals and Narodniks, gave a new lease of life
to the corvée system, perpetuating it in a different guise right up
to 1905.

The “new lease of life” given by Stolypin to the old order and old
feudal agriculture lies in the fact that another valve was opened, the
last that could still be opened without expropriating all the
landed estates. That valve was opened to let off some of the steam—in the
sense that some of the thoroughly impoverished peasants acquired a title to
their allotments as personal property and sold them, thus being converted
from proletarians with an allotment into proletarians pure and simple, and
that, furthermore, some of the well-to-do peasants, having acquired their
allotments, and in some cases having settled on otrubs, built up
even more solid capitalist farms than before.

Lastly, the valve was opened and some of the steam let off in the sense
that in some areas a particularly intolerable type of strip holding was
abolished and the mobilisation of peasant land required under capitalism
was made easier.

But did this new lease of life decrease or increase the over all number
of contradictions in the countryside? Did it
decrease or increase the tyranny of the feudal latifundia, or the total
amount of “steam”? The answer to these questions can only be the second
alternative.

The famine among 30 million peasants is factual proof that the only
answer which can be given at present is the second alternative. It is a
famine among small proprietors. It presents a picture of the crisis of
the same old poverty-ridden peasant farming, shackled by bondage
and crushed by the feudal latifundia. There are no such famines, nor can
there be, in the case of the big non-feudal estates, of the capitalist
latifundia, in Europe.

The plight of the mass of the peasantry, apart from the proletarians
who have completely freed themselves from the land (who “acquired” their
land in order to sell it) and a negligible minority of well-to-do peasants,
is the same as before or has even become worse. No acquiring of holdings as
personal property, no measures against strip holdings, can make the mass of
the impoverished peasants—settled on poor, exhausted land and possessing
only antiquated, thoroughly worn-out implements and starved draught animals
and cattle—to any extent cultured, to any extent masters of their farms.

Around a landlord (of the Markov or Purishkevich type) owning 2,000
dessiatines of land, the owners of tiny seven dessiatine plots will
inevitably remain paupers in bondage, however much they may be resettled,
however much they may be freed from the village commune, however much their
paupers’ plots may be “acquired” as their personal property.

The Stolypin reform cannot do away with the bondage and labour
service of the mass of the peasants or with famines among them. Decades
upon decades of similar periodical famines will be needed before the bulk
of the present-day households dies out painfully and the Stolypin reform
“succeeds”, i.e., before the established bourgeois system of the general
European type is introduced in our countryside. At present, however, after
a six-year trial of the Stolypin “reform” and six years of “brilliant”
progress in the number of those who have “acquired” their land, etc.,
there cannot be the slightest doubt that the reform has not removed the
crisis and cannot remove it.

Both at the present time and for the immediate future, it is beyond all
question that Russia confronts us with the old crisis of an economy which
is feudal as regards a number of survivals, the old crisis of pauperised
small farming held in bondage by the latifundia of the Markov or
Purishkevich type.

And this crisis, so graphically documented by the famine of 30 million
peasants, confronts us despite Stolypin having opened the last
valve that the Markovs and Purishkeviches have. They (and the Council of
the United Nobility along with them) could have thought up nothing
else,[2]
nor can anything else be thought up to enable the Purishkeviches to retain
land and power, than the pursuit of a bourgeois policy by these same
Purishkeviches.

This is actually what the contradictions of the modern Russian
countryside amount to: the pursuit of a bourgeois agrarian policy by the
former serf-owners, who fully retain their land and their power. In the
agrarian sphere, this is also “a step towards transformation into a
bourgeois
monarchy”.[3]

This step towards the new has been taken by the old, which has retained
its omnipotence, its land, its general appearance and conditions. This is
the last step that the old can still take. It is the last valve. There are
not, and cannot be, any other valves at the disposal of the Purishkeviches,
who are in command of a bourgeois country.

And precisely because this step towards the new has been taken by the
old, which has retained its omnipotence, it could not produce, and will not
produce, any lasting result. On the contrary, it is leading—as shown
clearly by all the symptoms of the period we are passing through—to the
growth of the old crisis at a different and higher stage of Russia’s
capitalist development.

The old crisis is growing in a new way, in a new situation, at a time
when the class relations have become much more definite; but it is
growing, and its social and economic (and not merely economic) nature
remains essentially unchanged.

A negligible number of good, otrub farms of the peasant
bourgeoisie, while the number of proletarians bound to allotments is
declining, while the Purishkeviches retain their omnipotence, while the
vast mass of the pauperised and starving middle peasants are in bondage,
and while the number of proletarians not bound to allotments is
increasing—such is the picture of the Russian countryside today.

Does it still have to be demonstrated that the Stolypin agrarian
programme cannot, while the Narodnik (in the historical and class sense of
the term) programme can, abolish bondage and labour service? Surely the
present situation in the countryside must suggest that given full freedom
of mobilisation of the land, good otrub farms would inevitably put
an end at once to all medieval famines, to all bondage and labour service,
if such farms were set up by the free choice of the peasants on all the
seventy million dessiatines of landed estates which for the time being are
outside the “land distribution system”? And will not the irony of history
compel us to say that Stolypin’s land surveyors have come in handy for a
Trudovik Russia?

Notes

[2]It goes without saying that the phrase “thought up” should be taken
with a grain of salt: the imagination of the class in command was limited
and determined by the entire course of the capitalist development of Russia
and the world as a whole. With the given alignment of the classes in a
Russia developing along capitalist lines, the Council of the United
Nobility could not have acted otherwise if it wanted to retain its power.
—Lenin